FTP and Telnet removed from OSX High Sierra (10.13.1)

15122017

For those of us that often have to use console servers to connect over IP to serial ports of devices, the removal of telnet from High Sierra is a bit of a pain in the bum. Here are two things you can do:

Use the ‘nc’ command to connect in exactly the same way as you used to do at the command-line with telnet. For example: nc <IP address> <Port Number>

SFTP is good and I use it wherever I can, but sometimes you come across some old kit that can’t support SSH or SFTP, so you just need those old tools. An alternative is to do this:

Enter Time Machine

Look for a backup taken from before your upgrade. You can

If you’re not using the time-machine interface, you can find your backup here: /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/

In the appropriate backup subdirectory, look in usr/bin and you should find the telnet and ftp executable files.